Shih Huang Ti

(translation from Spanish and comments by Gaither Stewart)

"He, whose long wall the wand’ring Tartar bounds …" Dunciad, II, 76. (1)

I read, in past days, that the man who ordered the construction of the nearly infinite Wall of China was that First Emperor, Shih Huang Ti, who likewise ordered the burning of all the books before him. That the two gigantic operations—the five or six hundred leagues of stone to oppose the barbarians, the rigorous abolition of history, that is of the past—issued from one person and were in a certain sense his attributes, inexplicably satisfied me and, at the same time, disturbed me. The object of this note is to investigate the reasons for that emotion.

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The 42-day drama in Pakistan is far from over; the declaration of emergency and the lifting of emergency are part of a charade, behind which exists a complex power play between Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, various camps within the military elite, and the US government. The Pakistani people are the least relevant to these calculations, although every player never fails to justify unwarranted actions in their name.

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Ron and Ron: Two of capitalism’s finest

“Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class.” - Al Capone

It has taken Nuremberg-class war crimes, craven ineptitude by Congressional Democrats, foreclosures on every other home in the neighborhood, and a metaphorical gun to our heads when we fill our gas tanks, but growing numbers of us US Americans are shedding our smug insularity.

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Edgar Guest wrote with such simple and yet at the same time splendid beauty. He could turn the homeliest and most familiar surroundings into heroic and sacred aspects of the dance of life. Not since Longfellow perhaps had an ordinary American writer appeared with such a capacity for transforming the mundane into the glorious, the consoling, the uplifting. To a nation overwhelmed by a tumultuous ordeal of change, Edgar Guest touched millions with the simplest words of the English language, and lifted their souls, gave wings to their hopes, and fortified them with almost spiritual armor to face the daunting tasks that faced, in Brokaw's words, our Greatest Generation. [*]

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Palestinians hold pictures of relatives jailed in Israeli prisons during
a protest in front of the Red Cross offices in Gaza City, Dec. 2007.
(Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights / Electronic Intifada

Palestinian prisoner Fadi Abd al-Latif Abu al-Rob (21) from the town of Qabatia near Jenin died in the Israeli prison of Jalbou' on the evening of 28 December 2007. The prisoner was a member of Islamic Jihad detained on 29 June 2007.

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International Middle East Center (IMEMC)

Abdul-Nasser Farawna, head of the Census Department at the Palestinian Ministry of Detainees, specialized researcher in the issue of detainees, stated on Saturday that 193 Palestinian detainees died in Israeli prisons and detention facilities since 1967.

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© Ben Heine Cartoons

The Independent

Weird, isn't it, how swiftly the narrative is laid down for us. Benazir Bhutto, the courageous leader of the Pakistan People's Party, is assassinated in Rawalpindi – attached to the very capital of Islamabad wherein ex-General Pervez Musharraf lives – and we are told by George Bush that her murderers were "extremists" and "terrorists". Well, you can't dispute that.

But the implication of the Bush comment was that Islamists were behind the assassination. It was the Taliban madmen again, the al-Qa'ida spider who struck at this lone and brave woman who had dared to call for democracy in her country.

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© Ben Heine Cartoons

Wrath of Hephaestus

Dying a violent, untimely and unexpected death, Benazir Bhutto joined the ranks of those political figures whose legacy in death is very different from the role they actually played in life. In life, she was an inconsistent democrat at best, and a willing tool of US imperialism, repeatedly making conciliatory gestures to a discredited military regime when she could afford to take a stand against it.

But in death, she has become the martyr of democracy and social justice. Thousands of working-class supporters of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) are rallying behind her name all over the country, and the military-dominated establishment is having a tough time controlling them.

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After 30 years trying to defy economic gravity, the US is well on the way to becoming the world's largest banana republic. If the current level of government mismanagement continues, within 20 years the US economy will be comparable to that of Mexico. With a more modest level of mismanagement, this will occur in less than 10 years but under much better economic circumstances.

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The Palestinian Information Center

Comment by Khalid Amayreh in Occupied E.Jerusalem

The day when Israel, the West and their puppet Arab regimes will be regretting their approach to Hamas may not be very far-off. Israel and its guardian-ally, the US, along with their despotic Arab regimes, calculate that the callous blockade of the Gaza Strip and systematic savaging of its 1.5 million human beings will eventually force Hamas to fall on its knees and cause many Palestinians to shun the movement.

However, in light of evidence accumulating through the years, the weakening of Hamas would more likely lead to the consolidation and strengthening of the al-Qaida among Palestinians, both as an ideology and an organization.

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Cross-Wire

Rudd Australia Report Card #1. Continued Australian and US Coalition war crimes in Occupied Iraq

Decent anti-racist, pro-Peace, pro-Environment, pro-Humanity, pro-Planet Australians were pleased to see the victory of the Australian Labor Party under Kevin Rudd in the recent Australian Federal Elections (24 November 2007) and the substantial Australian Greens vote which assisted that victory and which will restore sensible public review of public policy in the new Senate.

The Australian Government under PM Rudd was sworn in on Monday 3 December, 2007 – Day 1 of Rudd Australia. Kevin Rudd has made it clear that he favours “measurement-based policy” and “evidence-based policy” and has further asked his colleagues to give him Report Cards on progress.

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Popular Committee Against Siege (PCAS)

52 Patients killed by Israeli Occupation due to the closure!

96% of factories are closed

67 thousand factories employee become out of work

25 thousand of textile workers became jobless

100% of textile factories are closed

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latimes.com pictures

The gruesome killing of Benazir Bhutto in the evening hours of Dec. 27 in Pakistan's garrison town of Rawalpindi is yet another step in the process of weakening, and eventual break-up, of Pakistan.

Despite the crocodile tears shed in Washington and London over Bhutto's assassination, it was a disaster waiting to happen and therefore, was altogether expected.

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© Ben Heine Cartoons

NOTE: This is a cartoon I made to illustrate a chapter ("Hood on the Scarecrow") of Mike Palecek 's new book : "Iowa Terror", with a 9/11 theme. The book will be published in the Spring 2008 and offered to 9/11 Truth groups and peace groups at a discount rate. Please, read more information on the book and Mike Palecek's biography below the short novel. ~~Ben Heine

Hood On The Scarecrow

By Mike Palecek

(Chapter nine of Mike Palecek's book : "Iowa Terror")

The Digital Revolution
Oh my goodness gracious,
What you can buy off the Internet
In terms of overhead photography!

— Donald Rumsfeld, June 9, 2001, following European trip

Psssttt!
PSSSTTTT!
Over here!
Hey. How's it goin'?
Yes. I am the scarecrow. You didn't see me? Really?
Cool.

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Pictures indymedia.org.uk

During the last few days of 2007, Ron Kukal the Chaplain of the USS Liberty Veteran's Association and retired CT [Communications Technician] First Class and the Petty Officer in charge of the crew who recovered the remains of the 34 Americans who were murdered on June 8, 1967, and I conversed on phone and email about our frustrations of being labeled anti-Semitic when ever we speak up about the injustices the secular state and apartheid regime of Israel has been allowed to get away with. While I have only been speaking up for the last two and a half years, the old canard of 'anti-Semitic' has been hurled at me a multitude of times, but Ron and the survivors of that other day in infamy have endured that blasphemy for four decades.

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A recent news article by Carey Goldberg in the Boston Globe newspaper ought to have Massachusetts parents fuming mad. In fact, parents nationwide need to be on the alert as well. The long and stretched out arms of psychiatry are poised to put a choke-hold on your children.

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Global Research

Anglo-American Ambitions behind the Assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the Destabilization of Pakistan.

It has been known for months that the Bush-Cheney administration and its allies have been manuevering to strengthen their political control of Pakistan, paving the way for the expansion and deepening of the “war on terrorism” across the region. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto does not change this agenda. In fact, it simplifies Bush-Cheney’s options.

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Bhutto seconds before death

My soul is sorrowful and my mind frustrated over the cold blooded murder of a light from this world of darkness that we knew as Benazir Bhutto.

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Let US be perfectly clear on just one thing going into 2008: Congressman Ron Paul of the 14th District in Texas will NOT be allowed to win. Period – end of discussion!

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Under Ngo Dinh Diem, South Viet Nam’s U.S. puppet, things ran as expected for a while. Sure, there was religious persecution, rigged elections, prohibition of free speech, a managed press and the absence of liberty for the majority – all made acceptable by Article 98 of Diem’s amended constitution.

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Fedor Dostoevsky

(Rome) The “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” is the culmination of Fedor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. The work of three years, that novel was his most ambitious book and the culmination of his lifetime work. The 21-page “Grand Inquisitor” is also Dostoevsky’s final word on the question of man’s freedom.

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It is obvious that none of the major Presidential candidates of either the Democratic or Republican Parties are supporting the right approach to providing universal healthcare. Frankly, all the Republican candidates are going to be major obstacles to achieving this national goal. While the top Democratic candidates (Clinton, Edwards and Obama) do support the concept, they are all offering Band-Aid approaches for a life-threatening economic and health crisis in America.

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Pope Benedict XVI

Yesterday, Galileo on the black list
Today, “MORAL RELATIVISM

The World Church just cannot seem to get it right. As a rule it is centuries behind. Perhaps in the name of the continuity its theologians harp on. Shortly before he became Pope Benedict XVI in the year 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the man behind the neoconservative politics of the World Church since the relatively liberal times of Pope Giovanni XXIII, delivered in his inimitable, sickly sweet style a ferocious denunciation of relativism:

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It is being mentioned in high circles that US President George Bush was receiving heat for spending billions of dollars on propping the puppets of the Musharraf regime. It is believed that somewhere along the way Musharraf didn't want to continue this game of charades and was leaning more towards the care and needs of his people (in Pakistan) than to navigate the desires of the Bush regime.

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Thanks to some fearless investigative journalism by the Associated Press, voters can now ponder revealing new facts on what the presidential candidates hate to eat. We guess that's handy if you're expecting them to drop by for dinner. Don't serve liver if it's Rudy; lose the beets if it's Barack. Meanwhile, info on what our budding presidents would do about the country's massive budget problems doesn't seem to be on the menu.

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At long last, the age-old problem of health care for the poor and near-poor is being discussed in open forum. The problem has existed since the ethos of class differentiation was begun with the invention of wampum. In this modern age, it is only through the acivities of individual greed that it continues, despite the glaring fact that one solution is the only alternative.

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Tommy Arthur

I have written before about how we've seen more than 200 wrongfully convicted people released from U.S. prisons in recent years after proving their innocence via DNA or other evidence.

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Popular Committee Against Siege (PCAS)

Palestinians have consistently lived through the traumas of home destruction, nearly all families have its martyrs from life under occupation these last 60 years. The existing siege only helps them to relive the negative experiences all over again and Georgette is no exception.

A simple modest family came to settle in its home town of Rafah City, Palestine. The family maintained the slogan, " East or west home is best, to have a rest in your own nest" The father made all efforts to secure a very nice house for his family. He didn't care about the location, which was near the military posts of the Israeli border. He thought that they were protected by the International Laws of the UN Charter and that the 4th Geneva Convention is recognized during time of War! Yet, life turned upside down!

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“Sen. Mikulski has violated her oath of office!” - Ms. Diane Wittner of the Chesapeake Citizens, a peace advocacy group.(1)

You could see it coming a block away! I’m talking about the Democrats’ cynical gambit for capturing the White House in 2008! It goes like this: Let the Iraq War drag on and on, with our brave troops dying daily in combat, and/or sustaining serious injuries; but, don’t do anything to stop the funding for the conflict. Then, blame the horrific results of the war on our Uber-President, George W. Bush! (Keep in mind that this is the war which ex-Lt. Gen. William E. Odom has labeled: “The greatest strategic mistake in our history.”) Leave it to Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-MD), Neocon-Lite herself, to lead that deceitful campaign. In a front page spiel for the Baltimore Examiner, on Dec. 24, 2007, she laid out the anti-Bush themes that Democratic operatives will be mouthing, ad nauseam, in 2008. Sen. Mikulski, of course, left out the fact that she, along with many of her cronies, have been complicit in many of the wrongdoings of the Bush-Cheney Gang.

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Black Elk [ © faculty.uml.edu]

CarolynBaker.net

And So It Begins

In an incredible irony, the very people that the United States have most oppressed throughout our history may hold the key to freedom for all of us.

Few Americans remember the siege at Wounded Knee in the mid-1970s, but perhaps they should. Members of the AIM, or the American Indian Movement, occupied parts of Pine Ridge in protest over the brutal killings of two of their own, the disgustingly mild prosecutions for those murders, and the beating of the mother of one of those two when she attempted to seek justice from the U.S. government. The AIM were seeking their rights under U.S. law and for the U.S. government to honor treaties with the American Indian that had been ignored for more than a century. It was a lawful - and a peaceful until attacked - protest.

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'Criminalising indirect or vague expressions of support for terrorism unjustifiably
interferes in legitimate free speech.' ~~Dr. Ben Saul [Cartoon © The Age]

AntiWar

"They’re locking them up today
They’re throwing away the key
I wonder who it’ll be tomorrow, you or me?"
~ The Red Telephone (LOVE, 1967)

At Christmas time it has been my habit to write a column in remembrance of the many innocent people in prisons whose lives have been stolen by the US criminal justice (sic) system that is as inhumane as it is indifferent to justice. Usually I retell the cases of William Strong and Christophe Gaynor, two men framed in the state of Virginia by prosecutors and judges as wicked and corrupt as any who served Hitler or Stalin.

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DeesIllustration.com

Online Journal

Every four years the country is swept up in the pomp and pageantry of presidential elections. And every four years loyal Americans flock to the voting booths to select the candidate of their choice. Elections, we are told, are the true expression of democratic government. But they aren't. They're a sham and most people know it. The balloting creates the illusion of choice where there is none. It's a meaningless ritual that has nothing to do with representative government.

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Huffington Post

The citizens of the homeland didn't hear about it when he died, and many of them wouldn't have cared. They should be grateful we're occupying their country, some said. We're building new roads and bringing them our civilization. And didn't we let them elect their own representatives?

The Senators spoke fine words, but when push came to shove they yielded authority to their leader to do whatever he wanted. And so it came to pass that one more body was broken and one more life was taken.

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Information Clearing House

Few Americans understand that all government action is inherently coercive. If nothing else, government action requires taxes. If taxes were freely paid, they wouldn’t be called taxes, they’d be called donations. If we intend to use the word freedom in an honest way, we should have the simple integrity to give it real meaning: Freedom is living without government coercion. So when a politician talks about freedom for this group or that, ask yourself whether he is advocating more government action or less.

“…man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.” - Ronald Reagan

We’ve all heard the words democracy and freedom used countless times, especially in the context of our invasion of Iraq. They are used interchangeably in modern political discourse, yet their true meanings are very different.

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On the evening of December 26, (40) new Jewish immigrants
from Iran landed in Israel in the framework of a special Jewish
Agency covert operation...

Linking the "aliyah" to what the Jewish literature has been describing as Eretz Israel or Yisrael HaShleima (Greater Israel) to the Israeli colonial settlement of the Palestinian land, which the Hebrew state occupied in 1967, while at the same time negating the Palestinian Right of Return, is torpedoing whatever prospect is left for a peaceful solution for the Arab – Israeli conflict, undermining the latest U.S.-sponsored launch of the Palestinian - Israeli talks in Annapolis and further splintering, so far politically, the only viable Palestinian partner to Israel in any viable peace process, namely the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was an American contingent of about 2800 volunteers who fought on the side of the Second Spanish Republic during the country's 1936 - 1939 Civil War against the fascist Nationalist rebellion under General Francisco Franco. From 1937 through 1938, it aimed to stop international fascism under Hitler and Mussolini that led to WW II. This essay explains who the "Lincolns" were, why they're important, and what their relevance is to America today under George Bush. First a look at the Spanish Civil War and why these Americans fought in it.

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© Ben Heine Cartoons

NOTE: This is a cartoon I made to illustrate a chapter ("Decaf Candidates") of Mike Palecek's new book: "Iowa Terror", with a 9/11 theme. The book will be published in the Spring 2008 and offered to 9/11 Truth groups and peace groups at a discount rate. Please, read more information on the book and Mike Palecek's biography below the short novel. (The persons on the left are George W Bush, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney) ~~Ben Heine

Things will not be necessarily continuous. The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous ought not to be characterized as a pause. There will be some things that people will see. There will be some things that people won't see. And life goes on. — Donald Rumsfeld, Oct. 12, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing

Well.
I'm sitting here in the Hampshire Hideout Cafe in the uninhabited regions of Iowa.

I'm in a booth against the wall, green vinyl. I'm sitting alone, hand on my white coffee cup, turned toward the wooden door facing Main Street.

The ceiling fan in the middle of the room is on low. Mostly all it does is remind us, "it's hot, it's hot." Local legend says that if you turn it to high speed it says, "McKinley's dead."

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In 2004, Vanunu had attempted to celebrate his first Christmas
Eve Mass as a Christian in the Little Town of Bethlehem's
Church of the Nativity, which is in Occupied Territory.

And So This Was Christmas in USA for 'Flaming' Fleming and for Vanunu in Israel Palestine
eileen fleming

On Christmas Eve evening I picked up my mail and opened up a card from Jerusalem sent to me by Mordechai Vanunu. He made me laugh out loud, for he addressed it to: "Eileen Flaming" not Fleming, which is my actual name.

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Our government's plans to finish the police state are very similar to those used by the Israeli government in the pre-Intifada days of September 2001, where the making of aggressive preparations to create a defensible position served as the final spark needed to start the uprising which they then planned to repel. In other words, the provocative preparations that have been made in the name of fighting "terror" will, at some critical point, trigger the conflagration. Like the Israelis, the Bush government cannot know beforehand what the "last straw" will be, but it can reasonably assume that there will be some violent reaction to open government preparations for violence, which will serve as legitimate provocation for the total police state transformation of our "democracy."

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I don't think anyone will be having a very merry Christmas in Iraq.

First of all, Muslims typically do not celebrate Christmas.

But then, of course, for almost five years now, the Iraqis have had to share their country with the Western occupiers -- most of whom are Americans, and most of whom are used to celebrating Christmas in a big, glitzy way.

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“We are riding alongside Angus and Malcolm Young on the ‘Highway to Hell.’”

We “Free World” capitalistic Westerners are a loathsome lot—or to put it more crudely, we suck. When one considers how degenerate we are from a collective standpoint, it is difficult to suppress intense feelings of disgust and contempt. There are many layers to our repugnant, depraved, and “beloved” capitalism, a socioeconomic system which ultimately furnishes the members of its upper echelon with de facto licenses to exploit, plunder, and murder with impunity. Problem is that as one peels back each successive layer hoping to find some purity, one finds a more profound rot.

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The predecessor to the American Mafia was the Black Hand, a criminal group whose roots goes back centuries. They sold a form of protection. If a person paid up a monthly or weekly fee, the Hand would refrain from killing said person.

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Nataline Sarkisyan died just a few hours after CIGNA's
reversal, after having spent weeks of her short life in
a vegetative state.

It's like a story straight out of the movie SiCKO.

A pretty 17-year-old California girl needed a liver transplant, but her insurance company, CIGNA (based right here in Philadelphia), said they would not pay for it.

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The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Michel Sabbah arrives at the
IOF checkpoint outside Bethlehem

The Palestinian Information Center

From Khalid Amayreh in Bethlehem

Christmas is a season of good will. However, for Israel and its notoriously mendacious propaganda machine, Christmas is also a hasbara opportunity for spreading lies and disseminating disinformation and half truths about Christians in the Holy Land.

The usual seasonal dosage of lies includes such claims that Christians in the Holy Land suffer more from Muslim persecution than from the Israeli and apartheid, and that Christian emigration is not really attributed to Israel’s Nazi-like repression of the Palestinian people but rather to Palestinian “Muslim” intolerance and violence.

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It only took three million slaughtered Vietnamese, almost 58,000 Americans, Agent Orange, napalm, the destruction of Viet Nam’s infrastructure, billions of American tax dollars, about 30 years of American intervention, and almost 20 years of economic sanctions. Viet Nam is now democratized and safe for corporate plunder. Are the profits worth it? Their probable answer might equate to the response that Madeleine Albright gave when asked about the 500,000 children who perished during the U.S. sanctions of Iraq: “We think the price is worth it.” [1]

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(Rome) The myriad of European Union organizations in Brussels and Strasbourg have become grottos of secrecy. The shadowy EU government is in effect a non-elected “Commission” which makes decisions in secret that affect 450 million Europeans. Last December 13 leaders of the 27 nations signed the Treaty of Lisbon designed to substitute for the EU Constitution that citizens of France and Holland soundly rejected last year. Paradoxically the Treaty of Lisbon promises to promote transparency and accountability.

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Bintu Koroma is the only midwife at Kroo
Bay clinic

The Independent

Independent Appeal: The unluckiest baby in the world

Sierra Leone, only six hours from London, has the world's worst infant mortality rate. And for this new-born child and her young mother, the fight is only just beginning.

In the dark of a one-room shack, a new-born baby sleeps in the arms of a young mother. It could be a biblical scene. The glow from a kerosene lamp gives the mother a halo. Add an ox, a lamb and a manger, and this could be the story of Christmas, a painting of the Madonna and Child from the Middle Ages, or the living crib assembled by St Francis in the 13th century.

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A Palestinian dressed as Santa Claus hands out small gifts to Palestinian motorists
near the wall in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, December 2006. (Moamar Awad/
MaanImages)

Electronic Intifada

As Christmas approaches this year, the thoughts of Christians all over the world will once again turn to Bethlehem, the holy town where Jesus was born over two millennia ago. Voices will be raised in joyful celebration and children everywhere will recreate the Christmas story to help us remember the circumstances in which the Christ child was born.

Such a momentous occasion in such humble surroundings heralded a new way of thinking about people's relationship with God and with each other. It shook the foundations of an unforgiving society presided over by an unforgiving God and proclaimed peace and goodwill on earth amongst all people. There was indeed much to hope for. However, the tranquil pastoral scene so familiar to us is not at all evident in Bethlehem today.

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Popular Committee Against Siege /(PCAS)

Sam Armanda reports from Gaza

Gaza Strip, December, 2007. - More victims are falling down due to the illegitimate and criminal siege imposed by Israel on Gaza Strip. The number of dead patients has risen up to 50 in the past two days.

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President Correa of Ecuador

[Quito] I don't know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an hour-long interview with the President of Ecuador, I asked him about his father.
I'm not Barbara Walters. It's not the kind of question I ask.
He hesitated. Then said, "My father was unemployed.”
He paused. Then added, "He took a little drugs to the States... This is called in Spanish a mula [mule]. He passed four years in the states- in a jail.”

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Debate resumes next year before unlawful "Protect America" Sunset

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." —Third U.S. President James Madison in the Federalist, 1787—

The George W. Bush administration with the acquiescence of a congressional majority and the willing participation of multinational telecommunications corporations have conspired to violate the Constitution and cripple the courts in a scheme of unlawful spying on Americans.

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Popular Committee Against Siege (PCAS)

GREETINGS WITH TEARS OF RAGE IN OUR EYES

Felicity Arbithnot and David Halpin join me in sending our thoughts at this unhappiest of Christmas-times in Gaza. Greetings to all the citizens of Gaza, and the many new friends from my short visit last month. And congratulations to you guys at PCAS for producing this excellent website and providing a channel of communication with the outside world.

As an Englishman I am embarrassed to show you this letter just received from Kim Howells, Minister of State at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office responsible for the Middle East, in reply to questions put to him...

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Popular Committee Against Siege (PCAS)

Popular Committee against Siege (PCAS) is very sorry for what happened to you but this is an indication of the false claims of our oppressors. Israelis claim that they are democratic, but you have seen that they are barbarous by denying your entry to Gaza strip. This shows how Israeli democracy is false.

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Photo from Jer and Whit Visit Palestine

PeacePalestine

Statement from Eretz checkpoint

Apropos concentration camps:

This morning the Italian solidarity delegation, which departed from Rome yesterday, was blocked by the Israeli military at the Eretz checkpoint. Entry into Gaza was denied.

The criminal embargo imposed by Israel, the U.S. and the European Union is not limited to goods but does cut all human contacts. The Gaza strip is not an open air prison but an outright concentration camp. Prisoners usually are allowed to receive visits, but not in Gaza.

With the lockout of this morning the Israeli government slapped as well in the face of the Italian authorities. The Italian foreign ministry had assured that all necessary steps had been taken to allow the delegation into Gaza.

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Empire Burlesque

Last winter, I flew across the ocean back to Tennessee, after my oldest brother died. During this visit, I had with me a book I'd long meant to read but had never gotten around to. It was Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, by T.J. Stiles.

To call this work a "biography" risks misrepresenting the depth and scope of the illumination it provides. It is a masterpiece of historical reconstruction. By the time I had finished reading it, during long, empty nights after days filled with the business and busyness of death, I felt I had come to a new understanding of American reality: of the nation's history, of many of the deep-running currents in American society, and of our politics, past and present.

=> Read more!

© Carlos Latuff

Global Research

Almost two years after the most democratic elections ever held in the Arab world, as Palestinians struggle to survive in two disconnected and hostile fragments of historical Palestine, a besieged Gaza Strip and a coopted West Bank, with the enemies of the Palestinian people sending arms and funds to the side perceived as responsive to Israeli and Western wishes for use against the side perceived as representing Palestinian interests, the justification put forward by Israel, the United States and the European Union for their refusal to accept the result of the January 2006 elections, their determined efforts to overturn that result and their brutal collective punishment of the Palestinian people -- the refusal of Hamas to "recognize Israel" or to "recognize Israel's existence" or to "recognize Israel's right to exist" -- merits serious examination.

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Grieving family

The Palestinian Information Center (PIC)

Three Palestinian patients, including two children, died on Saturday in Gaza as a result of being denied access to medical treatment abroad because of the closure of border crossings.

These latest deaths bring the number of Palestinian patients who died while waiting for a permit, from the Israeli occupation authorities, to leave the Gaza Strip for treatment to 48 patients so far.

=> Read more!

Huckabee Would Open a New Chapter in War Against “Islamic Extremism”

Governor Mike Huckabee is leading the pack in the campaign to be the standard bearer for the Republican Party. Is the Republican Party, and the United States, ready to have a commander in chief who is an evangelical Baptist Christian minister? What would be the impact of having a minister as president when the U.S. is involved in a war perceived by many as a war against Muslims – or at least “radical Islam,” as they call it?

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In pictures: Attack on the USS Liberty

[Texas, December 20, 2007] On that other day in infamy: June 8, 1967, Lieutenant Richard Kiepfer, was the lone medical doctor on board the spy ship, the USS LIBERTY, who “with complete disregard for his own personal safety, exposed himself to overwhelmingly accurate rocket and machine gun fire…administered first aid…treated [171 wounded] men for pain, shock…[and]conducted a major surgical operation”[1]

=> Read more!

Already and early on in the soon to occur 2008 presidential elections, “The Establishment” has reared its ugly head and has begun to mobilize its vast resources against Congressman Ron Paul, the only honest, truthful and pro-American candidate of the lot. What is it, and who is it, that makes up The Establishment?

=> Read more!

As a POW, my captors would tie my arms behind my back and then loop the rope around my neck and ankles so that my head was pulled down between my knees. I was often left like that throughout the night.

=> Read more!

Intense debate over Gaza is subsiding as the status quo is delineated -- predictably -- by those with the bigger guns. But to what extent can human suffering be politicised, turned into an intellectual polemic that fails to affect the simplest change in people's lives?

=> Read more!

For evidence that America’s political system is a criminal conspiracy, open your mind to piles of new analyses that prove beyond doubt that the official 9/11 story is a lie. Years of a bipartisan cover-up of 9/11 lies make it much more than one horrendous past event. It endures in infamy as a symptom of a corrupt and dishonest government.

Every day we pay for what 9/11 and its cover-up have burdened us with, including the costly Iraq war and the erosion of the rule of law and constitutional rights. Power elites have suppressed the truth because they fear what will happen when the public understands that 9/11 was not accomplished solely by foreign terrorists.

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Popular Committee Against Siege (PCAS)

Popular Committee Against siege (PCAS) expressed today, Saturday, full readiness to act as mediator among all parts to reopen Gaza's borders. PCAS stated that there must be a compromise among all sides to ensure permanent opened crossings including Rafah terminal

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DeesIllustration.com

American Free Press

Renowned bestselling author, journalist Says Ron Paul’s life may be in danger

Bilderberg tracker Daniel Estulin says he has received information from sources inside the U.S. intelligence community suggesting that people from the highest levels of government are discussing “eliminating” Rep. Ron Paul because its controlled political system is threatened by Paul’s exploding popularity.

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Munich -And A Little Bit Of Everything

Seven-month-old Mohammed Abu Amra has been confined to Gaza's main children's hospital for four weeks now, suffering from suspected cystic fibrosis and immune deficiency.

The hospital has run out of the drugs needed to treat the persistent high fever and the strained, painful breaths which convulse his thin ribcage at almost twice the healthy rate per minute.

Fearing for his life, his doctors applied late last month for permission to transfer him to a hospital in Israel, but this week his family was still waiting to find out if the Israeli Government would allow him to leave the Gaza Strip.

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The Palestinian Information Center

Comment by Khalid Amayreh in the West Bank

I know I should be observing and enjoying the Eidul Adha, the most important holiday in the Islamic calendar.

However, the ongoing orgy of killings and maiming in Gaza, carried out by the children and grandchildren and great grandchildren of the holocaust, leaves me no choice but to identify with these unwept victims of Zionist wickedness and arrogance of power.

In less than forty eight hours, more than 24 Palestinians have been killed. A large number of people have also been injured, some sustaining serious wounds that will leave them crippled for the rest of their lives.

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Listen Up, Eye Rollers! Part 2 of 2

People who rely on broadcast media and/or government education to formulate their perceptions often roll their eyes in exasperation and conspiracy-nut-contempt when exposed to reliable information that challenges their beliefs. For the majority, easy prey for predatory propagandists and history revisionists, the possibility that they have been blatantly deceived by their own government is unthinkable, despite the monstrous evidence of pandemic corruption. Denial is the proverbial mental comfort zone; it is an easy refuge. It requires nothing! Schopenhauer said: “All truth goes through three stages, first it is ridiculed. Then it is violently opposed. Finally it is accepted as self-evident.”

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Mid-East Realities

While the Cross is outlawed on public ground – huge Jewish Menorahs are erected!

Menorahs symbolize what the Jewish religion calls miracle of the lamps and commemorates the Jewish military victory over the Greeks and the recapture of the Jewish temple which is now celebrated as the Jewish religious holiday of Hanukkah. The Jewish religion views Hanukkah’s meaning as commemorating Jewish resistance to the threat of intermarriage and assimilation. Instead of persecuting Jews, the Greeks of Syria accepted them and allowed them to assimilate and because of this the rabbis waged war and massacred them. Hanukkah is used by the Jewish faith as a lesson against intermarriage with Christians.

On December 4th a huge Menorah was erected and lit in front of the America’s White House. A radical Jewish supremacist organization called Chabad Lubavitch sponsored the menorah and it was lit by the prominent Jewish extremist and torture advocate, the new U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey. In America you cannot put a Christian cross on public ground; no symbol representing any aspect of the Christian religion is allowed. Christmas manger scenes, for example, have long been deemed illegal. But while crosses are banned from the White House and any public place, huge Jewish Menorahs are going up by the thousands all over the United States as well as in many European countries.

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In a way, to be indifferent to suffering is what makes
the human being inhuman.

(Rome) Yesterday I ran into a poem I had read as a student in Germany written by the Luthern Pastor, Martin Niemöller, who broke with the Nazis in 1933 and became a symbol of the German resistance. His words prompted me to look more closely at the complex subject of indifference he speaks of. Niemöller wrote the following at war’s end in 1945:

First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.

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IMEMC

Report: Israel continues to conduct Human rights violations against Palestinians

The Adalah Human Rights Group that is based in Israel has recently issued a report presenting a selection of the cases it has worked on during the year in which it challenged some of Israel’s most blatant violations of human rights against the Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians living in the West Bank and the Gaza strip.

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WSWS

One year of the Democratic 110th Congress: A record of duplicity, cowardice and political reaction

The Democratic-controlled US Congress ended its first year in office Wednesday with a record of capitulation to the policies of the Bush administration all down the line. In the main areas where voters expected a change when they brought the Democrats to power in November 2006—the war in Iraq, the deterioration of working class living standards and social services, the mounting attacks on democratic rights—the Democrats have proven to be Bush’s collaborators, not his opponents.

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American Free Press

It’s common knowledge, he reveals, CIA, Mossad behind terror attacks

Former Italian President Francesco Cossiga, who revealed the existence of Operation Gladio, has told Italy’s oldest and most widely read newspaper that the 9-11 terrorist attacks were run by the CIA and Mossad, and that this was common knowledge among global intelligence agencies.

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Christmas is observed December 25 by Christians and others celebrating the spirit of the season while for those of the Eastern Orthodox faith the holiday falls on January 7. It's to honor the birth of Jesus Christ even though it's widely acknowledged not to be his birthday.

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Popular Committee Against Siege (PCAS)

Sam Armanda Reports from Gaza Strip

For the past 6 months the Israeli occupatnts have committed illegal acts and savage massacres against Palestinians. These acts (massacres) are flagrant and obvious violations of human rights law, the Fourth Geneva convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights other charters. Infants, elderly men and women have been killed in cold blood. Yet Israel and its occupation forces say, "we are defending ourselves and own country!" Therefore, we ask a question: Are elderly men, women and infants holding guns? Are they firing rockets? Are they…. ARE they?!

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Global Research

It's been a lot of hard work, but Russian President Vladimir Putin has finally achieved his goal. He's cleaned up the mess left behind by Yeltsin, put together a strong and thriving economy, and restored Russia to a place of honor among the community of nations. His legacy has already been written. He's the man who rebuilt Russia. The last thing he wants now, is a pointless confrontation with the United States.

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Cracking the Code – Who's to Blame for "Violent Radicalization"?

The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 passed the U.S. House of Representatives by a 404 to 6 vote on Oct, 23. Not since the Iraq War Resolution have Democrats and Republicans found such a unifying cause. We're told that House Resolution 1955 (H.R. 1955) will be an essential tool enabling law enforcement to peg the sources of "homegrown terrorism" on the Internet.

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Internet Thought Control Bill Under Fire, House Committee Dismisses Criticisms of Internet Thought Control Bill – H.R. 1995

On Monday, Dec. 17, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security posted this document in response to the many criticisms of House Resolution 1955, The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007. Part 1 of this series examined the dangers that this bill posed to citizens and political groups using the Internet.

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pictopia.com

Global Research

Those who know about the centrifuges used to refine uranium tell me they must spin at an almost unrivaled velocity—almost unrivaled, because Bush administration statements are being spun at equivalent speed by White House and corporate media spiders.

Without weaver-in-chief Karl Rove and former presidential spokesman Tony Snow, it is amateur hour at the White House. And the theater would be as funny as The Daily Show were the subject not so serious.

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The Paris Donor Conference may make the Palestinian Authority richer but it cannot improve the economy of a no-state under Israeli occupation.

While the Palestinian Authority is euphoric about the more than $7 billion pledged by the Paris Donor Conference to help rebuild the ravaged Palestinian economy, many Palestinians remain sceptical about whether such a goal is possible under military occupation.

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Israeli border police run to to stop a demonstration of Palestinians upset by the controversial
and ongoing Israeli excavations near the al-Aqsa mosque. (Anne Paq/MaanImages)

Electronic Intifada

I am feeling optimistic about Palestine.

I know it sounds crazy. How can I use "optimistic" and "Palestine" in the same sentence when conditions on the ground only seem to get worse? Israeli settlements continue to expand on a daily basis, the checkpoints and segregated road system are becoming more and more institutionalized, more than 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners are being held in Israeli jails, Gaza is under heavy attack and the borders are entirely controlled by Israel, preventing people from getting their most basic human needs met.

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Carrying babies to their graves in Beit Hanoun. They died
because western politicians are cowards and racists under
the heel of the zionists. (Source: Kawther Info)

Committee on Standards in Public Life

Group urges Standards Committee to stamp out Israeli influence that paralyses heart of British government.

As the twenty-one month long siege of Gaza becomes a death sentence for yet more civilians, a group in the UK with experience of the Occupied Territories is urging the Committee on Standards in Public Life to examine whether there is undue Israeli influence at the heart of British government.

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Mahmoud Khayed Al-Kafafi (16) from Al-Bureij in Gaza was murdered
by one of Condi's friends, who ran over him with a bulldozer.

Ha'aretz

An old Jewish joke tells of a devoted mother who briefs her son before he sets out to battle: "Kill a Turk and rest," she advises. But the son asks: "And what happens if in fact the Turk tries to kill me?" She opens her eyes wide in surprise: "Why would he want to kill you? What have you done to him?"

This is exactly the kind of self-righteousness that accompanies our attitude toward the Palestinians. It is evident in the reports on the television, radio and in the newspapers - which paint only a partial picture of the conflict. Because when considerations of ratings and just plain cowardice determine coverage, the information the public gets is biased. In this way an extremist public opinion is created, which believes that all of the justice is on our side only, because "what have we done to them?"

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(photo: AP Photo/Kevin Frayer)

WSWS

Another conspiracy against the Palestinian people

Monday’s conference in Paris of potential donors to the Palestinian Authority, chaired by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, had nothing to do with the development of the Palestinian economy or the alleviation of the appalling suffering of the Palestinian people. Rather, it will serve to increase unemployment, poverty and oppression.

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© Ben Heine Cartoons

Media With a Conscience (MWC)

A Wrinkle in the Peace Negotiations

It is obvious who will speak for Israel at the peace negotiations. Israel's elected officials, despite some well-managed contrary rhetoric, will speak for Israel, and probably offer no significant concessions. Israel's Vice Premier Haim Ramon has already clarified the future of the negotiations by a statement that circulated in an Associated Press report, Dec, 9, 2007:

"Israel intends to hold on to all Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem, a position that undercuts the Palestinians' claim to the eastern part of the city for their future capital."

Who can speak for Palestine? The West Bank Palestinians are economically and politically separated from their relatives in Gaza, and both operate separately from the Palestinian community in the Diaspora. Hamas is divided. Fatah is divided.

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File Photo 2007

International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC)

Palestinian teen died on Wednesday due to the Israeli siege imposed on the Gaza Strip, Palestinian medical sources in the Gaza strip reported.

Dua' Omran, 18, was unable to leave Gaza to get medical treatment she needed to live due to the Israeli army closure of the strip. The Israeli army had closed all entrances to and exits from the Gaza strip in late June shortly after Hamas took total control of the Gaza strip.

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The Palestinian Information Center (PIC)

Palestinian lawmaker, Jamal al-Khudari, president of the Popular Committee Against Siege (PCAS), on Thursday, sent letters to the French Foreign Minister Bernard Kushner, the Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and the Quartet's envoy, Tony Blair explaining the situation in the Gaza Strip due to the total siege imposed by Israel.

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(Rome) I frequently criticize the popular-political deformation of language, not only, but predominantly in American English. I have in mind the tendency of calling “things” by their opposites, whereby war becomes peace, or slavery becomes freedom. Since euphemistic language continues to evolve and has today reached Orwellian levels I want to return to that subject.

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“Tell Stalin I shall be dying with his name on my lips.” - Nikolai Ezhov, ex-boss of Russia’s feared secret police, the NKVD, prior to his execution on the orders of the dictator.

Before he was known as a Marxist revolutionist in his home town of Gori, Josef Stalin was a published poet. Gori, located in Georgia, a region of the Romanov Czars’ vast empire, was then known as the “Viceroyalty of the Caucasus.” It sits between the Black and Caspian Seas. Stalin’s tenor voice was so good, he was hired to sing at church weddings. He was also a brilliant student, and a lifelong reader of books. He taught himself German and English. However, he ended up as a maniacal dictator of the Soviet Union and slaughtered tens of millions of his own people. In “Young Stalin,” author Simon Sebag Montefiore skillfully digs into previously unpublished records to profile the rise of the cobbler’s son from his humble birth in 1878, to his important role in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917--an event which shook the world. (1)

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"Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the third world,"
Kissinger said, "because the US economy will require large and increasing amounts
of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries.”

"Everything you can imagine is real"~~ Pablo Picasso

In 1974, a year after orchestrating a mass terror bombing of Cambodia -- after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize -- Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his National Security Council completed “National Security Study Memo 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” This document, whose sharp edges are dulled by page after leaden page of how to reduce over-population in the Third World through birth control and "other" population-reduction programs, was classified until 1989, but was almost immediately accepted as US policy, and remains the US blueprint for ethnic cleansing today.

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The story of Job is the role model for…struggling with God.

I hated to fly before THAT DAY we call 9/11, but I have flown more since then; than prior.

There is a force within me much greater than me, myself and Eileen, that has compelled, impelled and propelled me to journey five times to Israel Palestine since June 2005, and then to California in October and Texas this past weekend: where I met a 21st century Job.

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You say that Christmas has become too commercialized. In some towns the display of decorated trees is now controversial. Confused about whether to say "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays". What about Kwanza, Hanukkah, and the Holy Days of Islam? Maybe a simple greeting of "Peace to you brother" would be appropriate. Better be careful though with that one. I have a few friends who have been arrested for saying "Peace" at the wrong time in the wrong place. Ah, the stress of it all could drive a person to over- indulge in the spiked nog.

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© vtjp.org

Global Research

David Halpin argues that, under the pretext of “war on terror”, Israel and its allies are practising torture with impunity while the rest of the world looks on.

To inflict severe pain or mental suffering, especially as a punishment or to extract information: Latin – tortura, torment.

On this the 59th anniversary of the International Declaration of Human Rights by the UN one can hear the thuds, splutters and screams in a good many of those united nations. When did man first start applying physical and mental pain to his fellows? I doubt those artists and masons who made the beautiful cave paintings at Lascaux 20,000 years ago did this to neighbouring peoples. No, this expression of the worst in homo 'sapiens' came with political power and religious belief. It has been used more for confession and subjugation perhaps than the extraction of supposed information.

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Three young boys from Nuseirat refugee camp say they consider Afaq
Jadeeda Center their second home.

Electronic Intifada

Today's youth are tomorrow's leaders. They don't make the decisions today but will be shaped by ours and will in their turn shape successor generations. Now is our moment to influence not just the present but also the future. We won't have a second chance. It is an urgent and awesome responsibility with the most profound and far-reaching consequences. ~~John Ging, director of United Nations Relief and Works Agency's (UNRWA) Gaza field office, to British parliament members, November 2007

In the dirty streets of the Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, the sparse fruit stands carry only rotten fruit, because it is all the market's vendors can afford to sell, and all the refugees can afford to buy. "It will still be gone in an hour," says Dr. Mona El-Farra, "because they have to eat something."

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Photo Steven Senne / AP

The subprime mortgage mess is making headlines, but what the media barely mentions is that the African community is bearing the brunt of it.

Once again, bankers, brokers, lenders and even regular white working America have profited mightily and are bailed out by the government when their strategy fails. The African community is used, bled dry, and then criminalized and blamed for the problem.

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Year end is a good time to look back and reflect on what's ahead. If past is prologue, however, the outlook isn't good, and nothing on the horizon suggests otherwise. Voters last November wanted change but got betrayal from the bipartisan criminal class in Washington. Their attitude shows in an October Reuters/Zogby (RZ) opinion poll with George Bush at 24% that tops Richard Nixon's worst showing of 25% at his lowest 1974 Watergate point. And if that looks bad, consider Congress with "The Hill" reporting from the same RZ Index that our legislators scored a "staggering 11%, the lowest (congressional) rating in history," but there's room yet to hit bottom and a year left to do it. Why not with lawmakers' consistent voter sellout and failure record that keeps getting worse.

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Popular Committee Against Siege (PCAS)

To persons of conscience and decent people wherever they are:

In view of the fact that 5 months have passed since the start of the harsh siege imposed on Gaza strip, the humanitarian crisis has spread to all aspects of life in Gaza. This siege now affects the lives of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. It has also destroyed the fragile economy of Gaza and has put the humanitarian, environmental and sanitary conditions of more than 1.5 million people in the Gaza Strip in severe danger.

This disastrous siege is in obvious violation of international charts -the Fourth Geneva convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Additionally, it is generally a flagrant violation of the idea of freedom that constitutes the bedrock of the free and civilized world!

Believing in your crucial role, we appeal to you to help end this deadly siege. We call upon you to alleviate the burden and suffering of innocent civilians in Gaza in whatever way you can. Certainly, the siege, its ramifications and people's suffering will affect the possibility of spreading peace and security in the region.

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Twilight Zone / Haaretz

The old ruins can still be detected among the prickly pear cacti in the fields of Kibbutz Beit Guvrin. The newer ruins stand out on the hills above the huge checkpoint that is slowly being built not far away, at the Tarqumiya crossing. Abd al-Halim Natah is very familiar with both. He was a small child when his family was forced to leave their village, Beit Jubrin, and today he is an old man who is once again being forced to take his possessions, his children and his sheep, and leave his home. Israel is evicting him for a second time. The encampments and cave-homes in which he, his family and his neighbors live have been trampled because of the mega-checkpoint that is being built on the other side of the Green Line, on the site that has been their home for decades.

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CounterPunch

An Agency Which Destroys People, With Impunity

The latest CIA scandal will once again teach Americans a valuable lesson: It is the CIA, not the Congress, that is the ultimate governing authority in this nation. No one messes with the CIA, and the CIA knows it. That's why it knew that it could destroy CIA's torture tapes without asking anyone's permission. And, after all, as Richard Nixon's advisers told him, better to take a bit of heat for destroying the tapes than to take the heat for what the tapes contained.

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Rootless Cosmopolitan

Guest Column: Mark Perry offers 10 reasons why Hamas, rather than Abu Mazen and his U.S. backers will prevail in the struggle for Palestinian hearts and minds. The Islamists today represent the Palestinian mainstream, while Fatah is broken from top to bottom. Even more importantly, Abbas is increasingly isolated within his own organization, most of whose grassroots and mid-level leadership want nothing to do with the U.S. schemes on which Abbas has staked his future. By Halloween, expect Abbas to be either back in a unity government with Hamas, or else having departed the scene.

In the summer of 1997 I found myself seated in the office of Yasser Arafat in Gaza. I had known Arafat for many years, and was a welcome visitor. Being an American and a friend gave me privileges. Others weighed their words, but I was constrained by no such requirement. So as he thumbed through a stack of papers, I pleaded clemency for a friend who had been under house arrest in Gaza for the better part of a year. The man, a prominent security official, had ordered Palestinian security forces to fire on a Hamas demonstration the summer before and Arafat, enraged, had ordered him home. “He made a mistake,” I said. “It’s time to bring him back.” Arafat ignored me.

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President George Bush announces retired federal judge Michael
Mukasey as his nominee for attorney general. (Jim Watson/AFP/
Getty Images)

Consortium News

Last month, Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California joined Republicans to ensure Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General, even though he refused to acknowledge that the simulated drowning of waterboarding was torture.

Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada helped the Bush administration, too, by rushing a floor vote on Mukasey before rank-and-file Democrats could get organized and push for a filibuster. To show thanks, Mukasey now is slapping the Democratic-controlled Congress in the face by demanding it back off any oversight investigations into how and why the CIA in late 2005 destroyed videotapes of the waterboarding of al-Qaeda suspects.

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"The leader whose thinking process most resembles Adolf Hitler's is our own president. -Like Hitler, (George W.) Bush's ideological beliefs have blinded him to reality, and like Hitler, he seems impervious to advice that conflicts with his beliefs." - Charley Reese

=> Read more!

Salon.com

A Yemeni man never charged by the U.S. details 19 months of brutality and psychological torture -- the first in-depth, first-person account from inside the secret U.S. prisons. A Salon exclusive.

The CIA held Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in several different cells when he was incarcerated in its network of secret prisons known as "black sites." But the small cells were all pretty similar, maybe 7 feet wide and 10 feet long. He was sometimes naked, and sometimes handcuffed for weeks at a time. In one cell his ankle was chained to a bolt in the floor. There was a small toilet. In another cell there was just a bucket. Video cameras recorded his every move. The lights always stayed on -- there was no day or night. A speaker blasted him with continuous white noise, or rap music, 24 hours a day.

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Analysis by Khalid Amayreh in Ramallah

I am writing this piece as 300,000-500,000 people (according to Reuters) are converging at the Katiba Square in Central Gaza to mark the 20th anniversary of Hamas’s foundation.

Undoubtedly, the huge turn-out ( nearly one-third of the Gaza Strip’s total population) is an unmistakable proof that Hamas is still very popular among Palestinians despite the rabid American-led efforts to scuttle the movement, possibly in order to facilitate the appearance of a quisling-like Palestinian leadership that would succumb to Israeli hegemony and colonialist aspirations.

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After reviewing the mainstream media reports on the political response to the National Intelligence Estimate, it seems clear to me that the leaders of the 'Axis of Good' are bent on betting all their stakes on Iran. Although the summary of the findings of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies reveals that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003 and has shown no signs of restarting it, President Bush is calling it a "warning signal" instead of extending a formal apology.

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King James I of England, by Daniel Mytens (1621).
He believed in waterboarding and the Divine Right
of Kings. -Funny how that runs together.

Harper's Magazine

This has been an important week in the torture debate in America. It has been the week of the President’s coming-out party. Up until this point, torture has been something that “a few rotten apples” do. When evidence of it erupted in the media, a few grunts were quickly rounded up and scapegoated. Never officers, mind you—after all, they generally knew where the orders came from, and if you prosecuted them, they might just tell.

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Working people from Europe were flocking to Argentina to escape such desperate labor conditions.

Globalization is by no means new. The exportation of jobs—that is the loss of local employment that the beloved corporate word “globalization” implies—is as old as imperialism. The Egyptians, Persians, Greeks and Romans of the ancient world, as well as the Aztecs in the New World, solved the problem of labor costs with the use of slaves, slaves both at home and in their colonies. In more recent times the euphemism of “globalization” is applied to the outsourcing of labor to places where it costs the very least, from the USA to Mexico, as from West Europe to East Europe and Asia.

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Mountain lanscape, Northern Canada [ © Government of Yukon]

InI / The Editor

Sink or Swim - The ‘choice’ apparently, is yours according to Hilary Benn, but only if you can breath under water and swim.

Here, in the UK we have a minister for the environment, Hilary Benn is his name, son of doyen of the ‘left’ of the Labour Party, Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, whose swings from right to left are by now legendary (he’s currently stuck somewhere on what passes for the left).

Wedgie as he is known, renounced his aristocratic ‘pedigree’ to become plain ol’ Wedgie Benn. In any case Hilary (who seems to have dropped even more bits of his aristocratic legacy) is currently hanging out in Bali where the Climate Change conference has just come to a cliff-hanging conclusion, was interviewed on BBC Radio 4 on 14/12/07.

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Just because the collapse is planned doesn't mean that it can't be resisted. In resistance, perhaps we can hone-off the roughest edges of the unfolding transformation. The argument made, that "resistance is futile," ignores the human potential in a battle situation, where everyone is fighting for their freedom and their lives. We have no duty to mankind to lie down before those who would trample over us. I'd prefer that this Nation not continue to submit to the corporate "gang rape" that we have been getting for so many decades.

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Rarely has a candidate – with the exception of Democrat Dennis Kucinich – dared to
examine the relationship between Christian fundamentalism and the Iraq war, or Jewish
fundamentalism and the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s speech on December 6th - in which he tried to ‘explain’ his Mormon faith - was met with a mostly sympathetic reception at George Bush Library in Texas.

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In January 2006, Alan Greenspan resigned from his position as chairman of the Federal Reserve where he had reigned for more than 18 years. During that time he took on the mantra of the High Priest of Mammon and his public utterances were pondered with the same reverence bestowed upon the Pope when he speaks ex cathedra as Greenspan muttered and grumbled almost unintelligibly, straining the ears and boggling the brain of his rapt listeners. Now, from his exalted position in Valhalla, Greenspan offers his opinion on the causes of our present fiscal distress. The op-ed can be found in the Wall Street Journal, the house organ of the World Corporate Church.

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Popular Committee Against Siege (PCAS)

Since PCAS started its work to deal with this siege, it has contacted many persons and parties in high places. Yet, we have not heard that any position or stance that has been taken. Nothing has been done to alleviate people’s suffering. Thus, we call upon you all, and we ask persons of conscience in particular, to act and to please do something, even if it is by just speaking out, in order to help the tens of thousands of Gazans to solve the crisis that now already is upon them.

About 60 years have passed since our Palestinian catastrophe (Nakba). The Palestinian people has passed through and tasted suffering and calamity in many ways, and the Gaza Strip, which includes about 1.5 million people (75% of them refugees) got a big share of this suffering. From the start of the 2nd Intifada in 2000, the Israeli Occupation violated all the taboos international conventions and has tortured Palestinians severely.

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Couric, often dubbed 'pretty and perky,' does
have journalistic credentials, but in-depth
investigative journalism isn’t one of them. (art)

Sumner Redstone, owner and chief executive of Viacom, owns and operates Viacom asset Columbia Broadcasting System [CBS]. Redstone is one of the five richest Zionists who control well over 90 percent of the American corporate, establishment, mainstream media, or MSM. After hitting some political bumps in the road related to issues of favoritism and bias accusations relating to political party orientation, aging Dan Rather was “eased” out of his nightly anchor position in favor of CBS veteran newscaster Bob Schieffer. Schieffer served as interim anchor until Katie Couric was named permanent anchor and managing news editor of the CBS Evening News.

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On October 17, FCC chairman Kevin Martin proposed lifting the 1975 media cross-ownership rule that forbids a company from owning a newspaper and television or radio station in the same city even though giant conglomerates like Rupert Murdock's News Corp. and the (Chicago) Tribune Company already do. On November 13, he expanded on his earlier plan claiming changes will only allow cross ownership "in the largest markets where there exists competition and numerous voices."

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The recent disclosure of the fact that the CIA briefed a bi-partisan group of Senators and Representatives on the Congressional Intelligence Committees, http://www.washingtonpost.com about methods of torture used by the CIA, including "water boarding", http://www.washingtonpost.com is evidence that there is complicity in these crimes by members of Congress.

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The U.S. Constitution was the first written agreement in history guaranteeing the citizens government protection of basic human rights as reflected in its Bill of Rights. It was the realization of the fundamental human rights espoused by philosophers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Locke, but which had never before been granted by any previous government to its citizens.

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(Rome) The Italian political economist, Michele Salvati, notes in an article in the Milan daily, Corriere della Sera, that globalization has eroded the capacity of the role of the small traditional European ethnic state to furnish a model for the future. For Europe the emergence of China and India as world economic giants change the political backdrop of the world order. Huge countries inhabited by races and cultures different from ours point toward an accelerated shrinking of the planetary roles of Europe and the United States as we perceive of them today.

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Popular Committee Against Siege (PCAS)

Palestinian Medical sources reported today, Friday, that yet another child has died due to the illegal siege and occupation. The infant died after the Israeli occupants banned her from being taken abroad for treatment!

=> Read more!

If we Americans are nothing more than hopelessly addicted consumers who think of ourselves as an exceptional people with special entitlements; if we see ourselves as god’s morally superior chosen people; if we are selfish and greedy beyond redemption—then we are complicit in all of the horrible crimes that government commits in our name.

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Since time immemorial, individuals have banded together into groups (tribes, prides, flocks, clans, etc.) to serve the mutual aims of members. For the most part, they cooperate together, although in a hierarchical system with an organized "pecking order," so as to compete against other groups similarly formed into collective units. Apparently, such a pattern has fostered survival and, generally, has helped to ensure that the most fit live to breed in each successive generation.

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Will Allen, Executive Director, Growing Power Community Food Center,
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. [Photo by Mark Avery] [Illustration]

CounterCurrents.org

Most people in modern industrial society get their food mainly from supermarkets. As a result of declining hydrocarbon resources, however, it is unlikely that such food will always be available. The present world population is nearly 7 billion, but food supplies per capita have been shrinking for years. Food production will have to become more localized, and it will be necessary to reconsider less-advanced forms of technology that might be called "subsistence gardening."

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The PA is being pressured to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, leav-
ing vulnerable the fate of Palestinians in Israel. (Omar Rashidi/Maan
Images)

Electronic Intifada / The Nation

The Annapolis peace talks regard me as an interloper in my own land. Israel's deputy prime minister, Avigdor Lieberman, argues that I should "take [my] bundles and get lost." Henry Kissinger thinks I ought to be summarily swapped from inside Israel to the would-be Palestinian state.

=> Read more!

DeesIllustration © com

News Dissector

Banks Pump in Billions More. THE WORLD IS WORRIED: CENTRAL BANKS START PUMPING BILLIONS IN—NY TIMES SAYS IT WON”T MAKE A DIFFERENCE, AL JAZEERA REPORTS DISAFFECTION WORLDWIDE WITH US BANKING.

AJ: ”Central banks around the world have made a co-ordinated effort to stem a mounting credit crisis. The US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank on Wednesday joined forces with the central banks of Canada, England and Switzerland to cut interest rates in an attempt to stimulate the world economy by injecting more cash into the market. The biggest collective banking effort since the September 11, 2001 attacks shut down US financial markets will make billions of dollars available to private banks. But the move was greeted by scepticism in Asia as markets opened on Thursday.

=> Read more!

Here comes another inconvenient truth. Despite all the attention to Oprah for Obama and the pundit blabbering about the Democratic primary horse race, the outcome has been predetermined. What people do not want to know is that power elites control what the Democratic ticket will be. When the primaries end, the winner will be the reigning plutocracy.

Rich and powerful elites want Hillary Clinton in the White House if the Democrats get their turn in the rigged two-party system. Just one big problem: The establishment plutocracy wants her more than most Americans trust or like her. No matter how much she spends and no matter how many big name endorsements she gets, her phoniness and arrogance prevail. She would be America’s irritating Panderer-in-Chief. What to do?

=> Read more!

Global Research

Intrusive Brain Reading Surveillance Technology

"We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated.

The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain. ~~Dr José Delgado. Director of Neuropsychiatry, Yale University Medical School Congressional Record, No. 26, Vol. 118 February 24, 1974.

=> Read more!

The war party faction in the Bush Administration has suffered a pair of stunning political setbacks to their plans for further military confrontations in Southwest Asia. The danger of yet another Persian Gulf war is not over; but the prospects of perpetual war in the world's oil patch is reduced, for the first time in a long while.

=> Read more!

Photo © Luke Thomas, FogCityJournal.com

FogCityJournal/Independent Media Center

Opens San Francisco campaign headquarters

Virtually ignored by the establishment media, the famous antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan officially kicked off her campaign to unseat Speaker Nancy Pelosi with the opening of her campaign headquarters yesterday in San Francisco.

The date of her headquarters opening coincided with the date John Lennon was assassinated in New York 27 years ago. Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, hoped his passing would be remembered by people everywhere imagining a world of Peace and Love.

=> Read more!

Photo- latimes.com

(Rome) The failure of the mediation of USA, Russia and the European Union for a solution to Kosovo’s demands for secession from Serbia has the USA at loggerheads with both Russia and the EU about how to handle the new Balkan crisis.

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For the first time in history the world’s largest trading bloc and its greatest poverty bloc gathered at Lisbon, Portugal, for a "Summit of Equals" Meeting less than 400 miles from Casablanca (a stretch narrower than Bangor, Maine, to New York City) 70 nations, among them 5,000 delegates and journalists, assembled to listen and talk about history, economics, health and human rights within, between and among countries of the European Union and Africa.

=> Read more!

Desert Peace

WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?

GEORGE W. BUSH
We don't really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to
know if the chicken is on our side of the road or not. The chicken is
either with us or it is against us. There is no middle ground here.

=> Read more!

By Franklin Lamb - UN Headquarters, Naquora, Lebanon
Special to PalestineChronicle.com

The assassination of Brig. Gen. Francois Hajj on 12/12/13 could be a signal not to use the Lebanese army for Bush Administration projects.

Ever since one of this student's favorite Professors, Dr. Ruth Widmeyer, an accomplished and rare beauty still, who was the first woman to receive a PhD. in Soviet Studies from Harvard nearly a half century ago, announced to our Political Science class at Portland State University that our class would be representing France at the Model United Nations Session in San Diego, Lamb was smitten: both with Professor Widmeyer and with the United Nations.

=> Read more!

AIPAC honors John Hagee, believer in second
Jewish Holocaust (credit: Jerusalemonline.com)

We Hold These Truths

Announcing our Christ Followers Blogs:

A long time friend named John wrote in frustration about a reply he received from his pastor in response to his letter about the church’s lack of concern for the ongoing slaughter in Iraq. John sought an answer to two scriptural references, and to his frustration the pastor’s reply was entirely secular. This big church pastor ignored the questions involving Jesus and the Apostle Paul’s words. Instead, John was told how evil Saddam Hussein was; that Islam must be stopped, and that the State of Israel is an example of why all wars are not evil. (1)

=> Read more!

Israeli girls write messages on a shell at a heavy artillery position near
Kiryat Shmona, in northern Israel, next to the Lebanese border, Monday,
July 17, 2006. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

AntiWar

How many times have we read some variation on the following lede?

"Israeli armored forces backed by aircraft thrust into the southern Gaza Strip today, killing four Palestinians a day before Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were to begin laying the groundwork for peace talks."

The Israelis don't want to negotiate, but they're willing to go through the motions – after all, why not? It's just another way for them to thumb their noses at everyone, including their American benefactors. They'll never make meaningful concessions: there's no reason to as long as there are no constraints on their behavior. As long as a steady stream of American aid and arms keeps the Israeli ship of state afloat, Israel is the regional superpower, with none of its neighbors a match for its nuclear-armed military might.

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Wired

For years, no military program has sparked more fevered speculation from conspiracy theorists than the mysterious High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP. And for years, the Pentagon has been pooh-poohing speculation that the enormous collection of transmitters, radars, and magnetometers in Alaska was some sort of superweapon.

But, it turns out, the conspiracy theorists may not have been entirely off-base, after all.

=> Read more!

Electronic Intifada

The first Palestinian intifada (uprising or shaking off) erupted dramatically on 9 December 1987 after twenty long years of brutal Israeli military occupation. The Palestinians had had enough. Not only had they been dispossessed of their homeland and expelled from their homes in 1948 to make way for the boatloads of European Jewish immigrants flooding into Palestine on a promise of a Jewish state, they had been made to suffer the indignities of a people despised and rejected by the whole world. They were the victims of a colonialist project that denied their existence and their rights to self-determination in the land that they had continuously inhabited for millennia so that a state could be created in all of the land exclusively for Jews from anywhere in the world. To this day, the Zionist project has held powerful countries and august institutions hostage in its service, despite the indisputable rulings of international law and United Nations resolutions supporting the rights of the Palestinians. What Israel had not bargained for, though, was the steadfastness of a wronged people and their indomitable spirit that sent the first stones hurtling towards army tanks and bulldozers in their desperate bid to shake off Israel's crushing occupation. So began the "War of the Stones."

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The arrogance and unrelenting contempt that the Cheney-Bush administration has for the American people and the people’s Congress continuously verified and on public display, has reached exceedingly dangerous levels. The administration’s contempt for Congress and its controlling Democrats is unprecedented in the history of this now rapidly failing experiment in republic-based individual freedom.

=> Read more!

Popular Committee Against Siege / Tlaxcala

About 60 years have passed since our Palestinian catastrophe (Nakba). Palestinian people have passed through and tasted several sufferings and calamities, and the Gaza Strip, which includes about 1.5 million people, 75% of them refugees, got a big share of this suffering.

By the start of the 2nd Intifada in 2000, Israeli Occupation violated all the taboos international conventions and has tortured Palestinians severely.

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(Rome) Some European voices warn peoples of the Old World not to have illusions about the post-Bush period in America. Informed persons understand that it doesn’t matter whether the future American administration will be headed by a Republican or a Democratic President. The admonition bears a grim slant: the next US administration will judge Europe according to its commitment to America’s foreign wars.

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Crescent & Cross

On Dec.3, falling almost squarely between the day that Americans give thanks to God for all their blessings and the day that the world’s Christians and Muslims celebrate the birth of Jesus, the 16 most important organs within the US intelligence apparatus released declassified portions of the NIE or National Intelligence Estimate. Given the rhetoric of the last few years, what this report has to say is explosive, and that is putting it mildly.

=> Read more!

The US-sponsored peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland was neither a success nor failure, if one accepts that its so-called objective was indeed ‘peacemaking’.

From a US perspective, the meeting was, at best, a diplomatic manoeuvre on the part of the Bush administration, a last chance for becoming relevant to a region that is quickly escaping its grip. At worst, the conference was a desperate public relations charade aimed at convincing the American public that the administration’s plans for democracy and peace in the Middle East are unfolding smoothly.

=> Read more!

The Israeli jet aircraft were ruthless and stubborn in their attempt to sink and
murder all hands aboard.

By Phillip F. Tourney - Survivor of the USS Liberty

As I sit in my office beginning to write my first article for American Free Press newspaper, I look out my window. I see snow covered peaks, nature at its best in Colorado. It calms me to see such beauty and thank God I’m alive with my family. As I start to write, my heart is beginning to race, my palms are sweating. I’m not as comfortable as I was just a few moments ago. I know all of you know the story of the attack on our ship, the USS LIBERTY, by the government of Israel, but it needs to be repeated.

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Chavez and son vote

Dateline December 3, 2007 - the corporate media is euphoric after Venezuelans narrowly defeated Hugo Chavez's constitutional reform referendum the previous day. The outcome defied pre-election independent poll predictions and was a cliffhanger to the end.

=> Read more!

DesertPeace

It's been almost a year since israeli soldiers brutally murdered this gorgeous child, Abir Aramin. She was one of over 100 Palestinian children murdered in cold blood by Israeli soldiers in 2007. A wonderful group in the States is attempting to immortalise the name of this little Martyr by building a garden in her memory...a project that all of you can participate in and support.

=> Read more!

Deesillustration © com

Xymphora

The new Zionist meme is that all 16 (!) of the American intelligence agencies that burst the Zionist war bubble by putting an end to all the ‘Iran talk’ are part of an anti-Semitic plot to attack the Jewish people through protecting the enemies of Zionism. Following up on Podhoretz’s ‘darker suspicions’ theory (‘darker’ is the code word to mean that it is actually a theory about anti-Semitism, but I note with amusement that it is not possible to point that out in polite society, and all discussions of Podhoretz claim he was just making the baffling theory that it was an intelligence agency attack on Bush), Gerald Posner is resurrecting his old Zionist propaganda that the CIA had, and is repressing, absolute proof that the Saudis and Pakistanis were behind September 11. It is not a coincidence that this theory is brought up at this time.

=> Read more!

The Palestinian Information Center

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel said in its annual report, released this week, that “racism was so rife in Israel that it was damaging civil liberties and human rights.” “Israeli society is reaching new heights of racism that damages freedom of expression and privacy,” said author Sami Michael, president of the association.

According to the Hebrew press, the report’s key point includes a 26-percent rise in the number of racist incidents against Arabs and twice as many Jews reporting a feeling of hate toward Arabs.

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David Abrahams

"Once again the London Jewish Chronicle happened to be well ahead of any other British media outlets. In the main article of its Friday edition, David Abrahams, the leading protagonist in the current Labour donation fiasco, tried to explain why he donated money to the Labour party by proxy.

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Scientists involved in writing the report said recently that it is already out of date and that its predictions are too conservative.

Here are some very important scientific findings (not modeling) from this past year that were not allowed into the report because of a deadline of a year and a half ago for the input of scientific data.

=> Read more!

Mumia Abu-Jamal, Daniel Faulkner

With the December 9th anniversary of the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, emotions are running high here in the Philadelphia area and beyond. And Mumia Abu-Jamal continues to sit in prison for the crime, which he maintains that he did not commit.

=> Read more!

In this presidential campaign, much is being made of the faith of the people who are campaigning for the position as leader of our nation. Is Obama really a Muslim? Is Clinton a good Southern Baptist? And despite the service of John F. Kennedy, can a Catholic be a good president? How about Romney, the Mormon?

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'Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip.' ~George Orwell

Today’s media magicians really do perform in magical ways! Please remind me later (after the revolution) to nominate many of them for Academy Awards -- such stunning performances! Let's get to the meat, shall we? Did you enjoy the way the great American empire instructed its biggest tricksters to contain those of us who possess any real hint of rebelliousness or realism for independent thinking on what the hell is going on? Loud little suckers, aren’t they? Indeed. Well, keep the ear muffs on because this media circus will continue unabated as we endure another cryptic year in our ongoing struggle to survive tyranny in this land of dwindling opportunity.

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Though Marx’s description of global capitalism of 1848 could just as well have been written today, the wide appeal of Communism in practice born three quarters of century afterwards is not clear. What is it about Communism that led many historians to compare it with early Christianity and even with modern Jesuits? Why did Communist slogans also appeal to Islam?

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Photo- Homosexuals in Iraq left, and Iran

"In Iran, we don't have homosexuals, like in your country." – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Iran did it again. Makvan Mouloodzadeh, 21 years old, was executed because [he was] homosexual. The Iran Lobby, so powerful within some quarters of the Western “Left” and the so-called “anti-war movement”, will once again try to justify this barbaric murder and repeat the lies of the Iranian theocracy: he was killed not because homosexual but because he was accused of rape.

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(Photo - weekly.ahram.org.eg) Released Palestinian prisoners
wave from atop a bus as they arrive at Palestinian President
Mahmoud Abbas's headquarters in the West Bank after their
release from an Israeli jail

The PA has come under increasing scrutiny in the aftermath of Annapolis, notes Khaled

Just back from Annapolis, and with no tangible achievements to present to, let alone impress, a people long disillusioned with American-sponsored "peace conferences", Palestinian Authority (PA) officials have been trying desperately to convince the Palestinians that "this time it is going to be serious."

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Dear Nancy,

I’m getting all of these wonderful letters from a variety of politicians that address me as William.

Yours is the latest and I’m really pleased that the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives has entered into this friendly, informal dialogue with me. I’ve returned the pleasantry by addressing this to you as Nancy.

Your letter states that you want to hold the "Iraqi government accountable".

Accountable for what?

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Two weeks ago I wrote the following book review for Dr. Rev. Stephen Sizer's recent release for Amazon.com.

I received the instant message back from Amazon; that pending their approval, my review would be published in thirty-six hours, or not.

=> Read more!

The latest U.S. National Intelligence Estimate assessing Iran’s nuclear military capability was just released on Monday, December 3rd. The NIE clearly debunks the Cheney-Bush neocon regime’s neocon-job desperately trying to convince the American people and the world that a neo-Nazi invasion of Iran must immediately be put on the table.

=> Read more!

This article is an excerpt from Carolyn's forthcoming book The Spirituality Of Collapse: Restoring Life On A Dying Planet.

If we do not soon remember ourselves to our sensuous surroundings, if we do not reclaim our solidarity with the other sensibilities that inhabit and constitute those surroundings, then the cost of our human communality may be our common extinction.

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The world would be better off without "religion." And as a person who grew up on the inside of church doors I never thought I’d say the world would be better off without religion.

A person cannot enter and sit quietly reflecting in a building housing what goes by the name "religion" today. Why?—Because "religious" people are frightened of the poor, the addicted and the homeless whose conditions the religious people have to a large extent created then locked their doors against.

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God is always a magic word on the lips of political leaders. They can’t leave God in his place. They bring Him to the market place. It was as easy to con the ancient Athenians as it is for George W. Bush to con Americans today. God and public prayers work. Mention God and that He is on their side and people listen. People still fall for it.

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Abrahams is on the right, with an MP friend

On Thursday afternoon, Gordon Brown learned that he was to become only the second sitting British Prime Minister to be subject to a police investigation.

This is happening less than six months after Tony Blair had left Downing Street under the severe cloud of a police probe into the Cash for Honours affair.

=> Read more!

There is no shortage of speculation about "why" our leaders are still adamantly planning for the destruction of Iran, in the face of overwhelming popular opposition, even though everyone except the neocons and their allies believes that America would not survive our own actions. An irrational attack is planned and apparently the decision has been chiseled in stone. It may be for Israel. It may be for oil. Maybe it is for world domination?

=> Read more!

In our extraordinarily long presidential campaign the Republican and Democratic contenders have already debated many times and been asked questions on innumerable subjects. But puzzlingly, what has not been asked or meaningfully addressed is a question about one of the most critical dilemmas facing the next president. A question like: How will you as President insure that America’s constitutional republic survives a long war on terrorism?

=> Read more!

Photo

It is hard to shock journalists and at the same time leave them in awe of the power of nature. A group returning from a helicopter trip flying over, then landing on, the Greenland ice cap at the time of maximum ice melt last month were shaken. One shrugged and said:"It is too late already."

=> Read more!

Hugo Chavez addressed upwards of a half million supporters on the final day of campaigning for constitutional reform on December 1. He was confident of a victory that seemed assured. The turnout was impressive as a sea of red filled Caracas' main Avenida Bolivar boulevard and spilled over into adjourning streets. It dwarfed the November 29 final opposition rally Rupert Murdock's Times online/UK and Fox News estimated at "more than 100,000" ahead of saying "polls predicted an agonizingly close result" that referred only to the corporate-run ones. They turned out to be right.

=> Read more!

Bush: If it’s our oil, why do Venezuelans get to vote on it? GOP panicked that counting votes in Venezuela will spread to Florida

The Family Bush can fix Florida. They can fix Ohio. But it’s just driving them crazy that they can’t fix the vote in Venezuela.

=> Read more!

The form of government we have is anything but the democratic republic it purports to be. The more access to wealth a person has the more responsive to his or her needs the government is. Justice and equality cannot follow where access is denied or restricted. Far from a government of the people, for the people and by the people, we now have a government that is the exclusive domain of the rich and powerful and has the same level of exclusivity as an expensive country club or resort. The poor and disenfranchised are barred from entry and are thus marginalized.

=> Read more!

Picture unitedforpeace.org

Police brutality as a regular occurrence in America was once limited to specific areas in big cities. It was motivated by an “us-versus-them” racist police mentality that was formerly isolated to ghettos and included also organized crime strongholds in such big cities as Chicago and New York during the government-imposed Prohibition back in the 1920s and 30s. The “them” in the combative police mindset during this time was comprised of a certain race or a particular criminal class, and focused mainly on organized mobsters personified by bootleggers and gamblers generally identified as elements of the Italian Mafia. And in the mid-1800s, Irish gangs in New York City were commonplace.

=> Read more!

Against the sham backdrop of Annapolis, life in occupied Palestine is a daily struggle to endure and survive what Edward Said once referred to as Israel's "refined viciousness." This article addresses one week of it no different than most others. It shows the road to peace isn't through Annapolis nor can it be achieved without a willing partner or with the legitimate Palestinian government excluded. Talks are futile as long Israel spurns peace, violates international law, attacks Palestinian civilians, seizes their land, destroys their homes, restricts their movements, conducts targeted assassinations, denies them essential services, and holds Gaza under a medieval siege in the world's largest open-air prison while blaming the victims.

=> Read more!

British national, Gillian Gibbons, got into trouble in Sudan for enabling her
students to name a teddy bear Muhammed.

In my work as a human rights advocate, I am frequently asked about what we should do in cases where human rights conflict with religious or civil laws.

=> Read more!

Ureikat

Defending the farcical Annapolis conference, Palestinian negotiator Sa’eb Ureikat has been indulging in a lot of verbal theatrics lately.

=> Read more!

In a disturbing cartoon, security inspectors at a US entry point welcome a neatly dressed, probably European foreign passenger. Expeditiously they isolate him, efficiently fingerprint him and record his eyes, then medically they pore into his every orifice before photographing and x-raying him, after which, the dazed and confused tourist or businessman is pushed toward the exit under a sign reading: “Welcome to the USA.”

=> Read more!

I hate to use the "C" word, but there is no other way to say it. There is a national conspiracy to prevent renewable energy from becoming the primary energy source in the United States.

And who are the conspirators? The usual cast of characters: the fossil fuels industry, which continues to rake in exorbitant profits on oil and gas while it refuses to make any significant investment in renewable energy, even in the face of global warming; the members of the mainstream news media, too craven to cross their corporate masters by doing any serious coverage on the viability of renewable energy in today's market; and the members of Congress, too addicted to the big bucks they receive from Big Oil and other traditional energy sources to create any sweeping renewable energy legislation for the good of the country.

=> Read more!

“One’s first obligation is to the moral truth buried deep inside our own souls.” - Ex-Private First Class Joshua Key, U.S. Army (1)

From soldiers in the U.S. Army, who refused to be deployed to Iraq; to diplomats who resigned their offices rather than endorse an illegal war; to courageous whistleblowers inside the U.S. and British governments, who put themselves at risk to tell the truth about the lies that took their countries to war; this book has it all, and more. Entitled: “Dissent: Voices of Conscience,” it is co-authored by Colonel (Ret.) Ann Wright and Susan Dixon. Susan Dixon is a college professor. Colonel Wright was a high-ranking State Department diplomat, who objected to the Bush-Cheney Gang’s dastardly scheme to attack Iraq. Faithful to her duty to the U.S. Constitution, she resigned from her post rather than endorse policies that she didn’t ”believe in” and could not “defend.” (2)

=> Read more!

Mordechai Vanunu, a secular Jew and Israeli nuclear technician
was kidnapped in Rome by the Mossad, drugged, clubbed and
secretly transported back to Israel.

"We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but as human beings, members of the species, Man, whose continued existence is in doubt ... We shall try to say no single word which should appeal to one group rather than to another. All, equally, are in peril, and, if the peril is understood, there is hope that they may collectively avert it. ... The question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military conflict of which the issue must be disastrous to all species?"- Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, July 1955, at the height of the Cold War.

=> Read more!

ONLF/OHRC brutality

Many people have been saying for months that all the fictional tales of human rights abuse by Ethiopia in Ogaden are being claimed only by supporters of the ONLF insurgency in Ogaden. These claims did not come from impartial groups who can qualify as credible refugee witnesses. I covered about this last month HERE and showed that supporters of the ONLF terrorist organization will flee out of Ethiopia (as directed by ONLF) when our troops attack the ONLF. And meanwhile, common sense indicates that supporters of Ethiopia will take shelter in Ethiopia during this conflict in the Ogaden.

=> Read more!

If they warm to the point that they begin to release the clathrates that they hold at
the sea floor, that will be a catastrophic tipping point for all life on Earth.

Global warming seems mysterious to most of us. A 1 degree rise in annual global temperature sounds minuscule, doesn't it... until you remember that the oceans are involved... very heavily involved.

=> Read more!

A once profound and widely read commentator recently claimed he no longer writes about the Palestine/Israel conflict because "Palestinians are killing each other". Feeling his words have ceased to carry weight he simply decided not "to take sides".

What should be made of such a reaction? Granted, what has transpired in Palestine in recent years is disheartening, demoralising and confusing.

=> Read more!

RFK, Jr. has disappointed millions of liberals, progressives and environmentalists by endorsing Hillary Clinton.

RFK, Jr. once said: “the Republicans are 95 percent corrupt and the Democrats are 75 percent corrupt.” This has been widely quoted because of its honest assessment of the corrupt two-party system.

=> Read more!

The Palestinian Information Center

Hanukkah is the Jewish holiday of light that recounts the Talmudic story of the Maccabees’ victory over the armies of King Antiochus IV. The story symbolizes the triumph of Good over Evil and Light over Darkness.

This year, the celebration of Hanukkah coincides with a slow-motion genocide the legions of Zionism are carrying out against nearly 1.5 million helpless human beings in the Gaza Strip.

=> Read more!

The Vietnam War was protested throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Protests, rallies and demonstrations occurred across the nation...

'Drag your tongue across the sugar cube and hope you get a taste. It’s like smelling the food but you're not allowed to touch the silverware. Fascism you can vote for, how sweet.' ~’Omegg.’ Just a small entertaining taste of poetry with a twist, from the rock band ‘Stoned Sour.' (a great rant when heard in its entirety)

Dear citizens of a crumbling nation, have you even noticed our country is being demolished all around us? Haven’t you noticed the pillars shaking, the foundation cracking, and debris falling everywhere?

=> Read more!

thornwalker.com

While the neoconservatives were the driving force behind the American invasion of Iraq and the consequent efforts to bring about regime change throughout the Middle East, the idea for such a war did not originate with American neocon thinkers but rather in Israel. An obvious linkage exists between the war position of the neocons and what has long been a strategy of the Israeli Right and, to a lesser extent, of the Israeli mainstream.

=> Read more!

Jeff's Weather Log

News With Views

Gore is right about only one thing. The world is going through a period of climate change. It does every 50 years or so, every 100 years or so, every 1,000 years or so, and more dramatically, every 10,000 to 100,000 years or so.

You probably won't read this in any US paper, but the Brits aren't too impressed with former Vice President Al Gore's sci fi flick, An Inconvenient Truth. The British high court ruled Gore's Academy Award winning global warming film cannot be shown in any public school in England without an explicit disclaimer. The high court ruled that students must be warned that the film is partisan, political advocacy, not a factual representation of what is actually happening with the climate of the world. The disclaimer must stipulate that misleading exaggerations permeate the film. The court said the film contained far too many factual errors to be shown in the public school system without a disclaimer.

=> Read more!

“Time’s glory is...to wrong the wronger, till he render right.” - William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon

On Nov. 27, 2007, an ultra-hyped, one-day Mideast parley was held in Annapolis, MD, the capital of the state. This is also where the U.S. Naval Academy is located. The idea that the hawkish Bush-Cheney Gang is going to successfully broker an Israel/Palestine peace is absurd. In a show-off-like gesture Maryland’s Governor, Martin O’Malley invited Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, for lunch on that day. But, he deliberately chose to exclude the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. The luncheon took place in the Governor’s Mansion. O’Malley, instead of acting like a statesman, came off as a lackey for the Israel Lobby, while also embarrassing many Marylanders.

=> Read more!

© Steve Bell

Smoking Mirrors

Switched on CNN for two minutes to see the headline ticker and they were having the headlines update before going to Amanpour’s hatchet job on Vladimir Putin; commercial in constant play… Putin evil... yack …yack… yack. What did I see? - …timing is everything. Hugo Chavez is claiming that CNN was calling for his assassination based on ‘mistakes’ made by CNN in their broadcasting. They actually said that, “mistakes” but no explanation. I’ll just bet whatever it was, was an accident; no way did the alien life forms over at Time Warner send down a memo to make a mistake. I don’t know what the mistake was but it must have been one. These kinds of people don’t admit to mistakes unless someone has Polaroids and DNA and not then either.

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Senate bill, S. 1959, The "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007," http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=110_cong_bills&docid=f:s1959is.txt.pdf is being rushed through Congress to identify all Americans who have an "extremist belief system," as "homegrown terrorists," charging them with "radicalization," for "advancing political, religious, or social change" by spreading their extremist beliefs.

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brusselstribunal.org

The Green Zone government and its militias are attacking civilians across Iraq to halt the resistance. The US and all occupying forces are legally and morally responsible for protecting all Iraqi civilians. No level of atrocity can break the geopolitical unity and sovereignty of Iraq.

The human community must wake up. The sufferings of the Iraqi people are tragic and criminal. Whole cities are under siege: Fallujah, Sammara, Kirkuk, Haditha, Hit, Ramadi. Latifiyah, Tarmiyah, Baaquba, Moqdadiyah, Buhruz, Madaen, Abualkhasib, Al-Zubeir, Fahamma, Tel Afar, Husaiba.

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© Heather Stanfield

Global Research

Eurasia and the History of War

History is often self-repeating. Those who are oblivious to the lessons of history are, by virtue of ignorance, doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Samuel P. Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations,” is an outright camouflage, an ideological instrument used to reach geo-political objectives. This "conflict notion" is part of a broad strategy which has been used throughout history to divide, conquer, and rule.

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Online Journal

Israelis are concerned about Iran's nuclear programme, which they believe is an existential threat. Supporting this argument they misquote the Iranian president as saying he wants to wipe Israel off the map.

They are right to be worried but their concerns are misplaced. Israel's continued existence as a Jewish state may be in the balance but this has nothing to do with Iran.

Let's be practical. Even if Iran did develop a nuclear weapon -- and there is no evidence it intends doing so -- its leaders would have to be suicidal to send it Israel's way. Israelis should quit hyping a non-existent Iranian threat and concentrate, instead, on real hazards that menace their future. What are they?

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Palestinian police answerable to Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas have been terrorizing non-conformist Palestinian journalists throughout the West Bank in a manner unprecedented since the creation of the PA following the Oslo Accords in 1993.

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Retorting to Flatto’s tirade, Amayreh reminded him that Israeli forces
murdered more than 800 Palestinian kids and minors and hundreds of
other innocent civilians in seven years and that Israeli soldiers routinely
and nonchalantly kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank.

An Israeli radio talk-show host on Friday, 30 November, called on the Israeli occupation army to arrest an outspoken Palestinian journalist for criticizing the Israel policies and practices “too harshly” and for “inciting the world against Israel and the Jewish people as well as for promoting anti-Semitism.”

Samuel-Flatto-Sharon, an extreme right-winger, who also hosts a popular talk-show called “Flatto Bli Kheshbone (Flatto without accountability) called Palestinian journalist Khalid Amayreh, whom he was interviewing, the “most sinister anti-Semite ever.”

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In 2007, Black Box Voting embarked on a year-long investigative series examining elections in what we call the Moonshine territories – reputedly the most corrupt local governments in America. What we found has staggering implications for the design of American election systems as a whole. Our current system only works if we trust every human link in the chain. In this report we will knock the concept of trust-based elections out the window.

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As I sit and read the announcements from today’s first discussions from Annapolis, all I can see is another dismal failure for peace and another year long “negotiation” process that like Oslo, Camp David, the ‘road map’ all lead to the same place. That place, as so clearly denoted by the late Tanya Rinehart, is nowhere.

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Now that the gruesome details of the ethnic cleansing tactics being employed by the current autocracy in Addis Ababa are slowly coming out, it is not unexpected for the Ethiopian prime minister to come out swinging against the veracity of the genocidal stories trickling out of Ogaden with the Ogaden refugees. After all who expects a slayer, at the level of Mr. Meles Zenawi, to own up to the military indiscretions of his minions and militias in Ogaden.

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